Book Review: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway: A Biography

by Mary V. Dearborn

Knopf, 2017

“I have no investment in the Hemingway legend,” writes Mary Dearborn at the start of her exhaustive and brilliant new book Ernest Hemingway: A Biography. “I think we should look away from what feeds into the legend and consider what formed this remarkably complex man and brilliant writer.” She goes on in this vein a bit, and readers who are tempted to see these comments as directly squarely at Hemingway's legion of worshipful hagiographers might be right, but they'd also be hard-pressed to say such comments aren't justified – and they're worth listening to:

What happened to Hemingway was a tragedy for him; a tragedy for his family, who had to endure it and were often damaged in the process; and a tragedy for us. It does no good to read (or write) his biography anew if we simply shine up the legend and find more ways ot admire it – or if we reflexively debunk a literary legacy that has proved durably fascinating and inspiring for nearly a century. We need to understand what happened, in part because what was lost was incalculable.

Hemingway – both as a writer and a man – is certainly more thoroughly understood in Dearborn's book than in any previous major biography. This is partly due to the amazingly wider ambit of research Dearborn brings to her subject than previous biographers have done: Hemingway's Cuban papers (left behind when he fled the island in 1960), the letters and memoirs of his friends, family, mistresses, and rivals, and, a source Dearborn uses with particular insight, his voluminous medical records. And it's also partly due to Dearborn's immense personal sympathy for the author's tortured world, especially the world of his periodic self-described “mania”:

Mental illness coursed through the Hemingway family like one of the rivers Ernest wrote about with such beautiful economy, its incessant, implacable force pausing only in small eddies, where illness cursed individuals like Ed Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway, Greg Hemingway, and, later, some in the next generation, and, reportedly, in those after that. It took and continues to take the form of cycles of mania and psychotic depression; alcoholism and other addictions; and suicide.

But the main strength of this biography is Dearborn's willingness to dislike her subject, sometimes even to hate him. She watches his interactions with his four wives, his editors, his neighbors, his family, his colleagues … she traces every available detail of these interactions with finesse and considerable narrative skill, and unlike the many men who've written full-length biographies of Hemingway (she's the first woman to do so), she watches these relationships with neither suppressed envy nor unacknowledged rivalry. And as a direct result, she never at any point in her book allows Hemingway to do what he invariably did during his lifetime: paper over boorish or sadistic behavior with garrulous charm, disingenuous self-mockery, or outright bribery. In short, she holds him accountable, and it's consistently refreshing to read, even if the resulting picture can be wincingly tawdry. Under such forensic exhumation, friendship with Ernest Hemingway can often seem like an unbearable ordeal – seen most clearly in Dearborn's perceptive chapters on his wives, but also a defining feature of his dealings with his contemporaries in the literary world. Dearborn's analysis of a pair of letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1930s shows this clearly:

Ernest and Scott had exchanged letters in December 1935, Ernest inviting Scott to go with him to see a prizefight in Havana. Scott had evidently not been enthusiastic enough about Green Hills of Africa, so Ernest became abusive: “Was delighted from the letter to see you don't know any more about when a book is a good book or what makes a book bad than ever,” he wrote, a comment that suggests Ernest was still keen to dismiss the good work Scott had done on The Sun Also Rises. In another letter to Scott five days later, Ernest started out solicitous, commiserating over insomnia, the ravages of drinking, and so forth. But he then turned on Scott in what he may well have meant as black humor. The conceit was that Scott should get himself heavily insured and come with him to Cuba where he could get killed in the revolution. Hemingway's and Scott's other friends could then give Scott's liver to the Princeton Club, one lung to Max Perkins, and the other to Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer. If they could find his balls they could be taken on the Ile de France to Paris and then to Antibes, where they could be thrown in the sea at Eden Roc with MacLeish reading some profound verses. Ernest was so taken with the conceit that he even provided some lines for such a poem.

“He eviscerated his friend,” Dearborn sums up, “as neatly as he might gut a trout.”

Perhaps out of a sense of mercy – rare enough in these pages but never withheld when needed – the book's pace accelerates considerably when covering Hemingway's final years, when “flashes of anger were interspersed with his depression and a sort of creeping listlessness.” The end comes as no surprise to modern readers who often know only that detail about this author.

The book is a masterpiece of the biographer's art, judicious and curious in perfect measure, tough at precisely those junctures where most books about this man have been tender. Had it appeared when Hemingway was alive, it would have driven him to a madness of rage. But he could not have faulted its art, and his friends would have cheered every page in secret.